Just a very quick update: KDE's release team has made available the last release candidate before 4.5.0 comes out next week. Please give it another whirl and tell us about problems with this release. Tagging will happen in the next days, so be quick doing that!

This dual/triple bug still exist:https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156475
and that is a bid older than those you link to. This bug is still keeping my at kde 3.5. Aaron has promised me that he would look at it at some point (hopefully before 3.5 is complete dead)

or someone who has a dual head setup could do some work on it. it's very odd that everyone sits waiting for a person without a multi-screen system to fix these kinds of bugs. :)

and no, i won't be getting one in the near future as i'm planning on moving continents early 2011 and don't need more stuff to pack and ship :)

i do have a couple of ideas for how to fix that issue (which is actually an annoying limitation around the dbus session and x.org sessions), ranging from hopefully not traumatic (launching a non-uniqueapp version of the shell in such situations on the secondary screens; not very pretty, but at least pretty trivial), changing the application name based on the screen name so as not to trigger the unique app problem in the first place (possibly the cleanest, but need to see if it will actually work) ...

still, that "no multiple screens with which to test" is a bugger, and no, i'm completely uninterested in running "fake xinerama" setups (not that it would help in this particular case anyways :)

I am one of the few that have not imegrated to kde 4 from kde 3.5 and that is becouse of this bug.
The problem with fixing it myself is that I dont know what to do. That is why I have sat up a bounty on 150 doller on it (and another person has added another 50 doller so you can earn 200 doller if youfix it).

the plasma issue isn't driver related (see the bug report)
The popup issue is minor, i know but it's an issue
The third issue is really a problem, here on intel hardware, all is unusable, downgrading to 4.4 fix it :(

... i've seen another flurry of bug fixing activity for issues visible in Dolphin (which may mean the fix is actually in kdelibs, e.g.) with a few new review requests coming in from Penz and Trueg as well as straight-to-svn commits. it's a WIP, but it's getting there.

the alternative, of course, would be to say "you can't have this for another N years" while we try to work out every bug. that doesn't work at all, though, as our dependencies (and thus our defect profile) changes over time even if we don't release, it's exponentially harder to identify issues without a large test base and if we don't release we lose users (understandably) due to not having anything recent for them to use (particularly an issue as the infrastructure beneath us moves around, e.g. HAL deprecation, network management twists, Qt improvements, etc, etc)

so we are on a journey. and i think it's pretty evident that each milestone along the journey (aka a release :) has been better than the last.

There are still a ton of bugs out there, from a serious information disclosure issue (screen saver not on while resumes from hibernate, then does come on) to major graphical glitches with core widgets (CPU / temp gauges show garbage). This have been around through all the other RCs, and logged in the tracker.

Not happy; are the KDE developers even eating their own RC dog food ? These bugs are obvious and look like easy fixes to me ! If this release is meant to be about polish, why are these glaring glitches not being fixed ?

> These bugs are obvious and look like easy fixes to me !
Obviously if you have the _same_ machine, and _same_ configuration.

The screensaver-off-on-suspend doesn't happen for me on openSUSE for example. Actually all 4.5-RC* releases have worked really decent for me.

Things which are "obviously to see at first sight" are not always 100% the same at every system.

At regarding https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219873 in the bug report you can read it's a simple glitch, but _really hard to fix_. Don't think it won't happen, but perhaps not within one release cycle. Bummer. Get over it. 1000+ other bugs did get fixed. We all like everything to be insanely better, but this happens gracefully in cycles of 6 months.

> Not happy; are the KDE developers even eating their own RC dog food ?
Agreed, not all are. This is imho where we need _different personalities_ not more management pushing "you might use the RC".

- You've got people who get development up speed, by always being at the edge.
- And there are people who don't have this desire, but like to make things perfect.

KDE could use more people from the second group, and that's something we can all work on. Making KDE attractive to different types of people. :-)

Yeah, put me in the second group - I'm not going to run daily/weekly builds as I need my machine to work.
But RC should mean that - a release that is as good as it can be made (obviously, time and resource allowing).
Letting simple graphical things slide makes the experience just as bad (worse ?) as the things like the power button being screwed up or the screen saver not playing well with hibernate.

patches are very welcome. they can join the hundreds of commits made every day to KDE's code.

i do thin, though, that saying that and then linking to https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=219873 given comment #44 is a little disingenuous. there you have a Nokia Qt developer on the bug report saying he's working on it, but that it isn't trivial.

"are the KDE developers even eating their own RC dog food ?"

not everyone runs every piece of KDE software from trunk, but many of us run primarily or even 100% trunk installations. so.. yes.

you may have noticed that some bugs are more critical than others, and so get prioritized higher. given infinite time or more people working on individual bugs, more things would get fixed yesterday. the rate of bug closure per release is pretty amazing, even if it doesn't mean every single bug ever reported gets fixed in release+1. we get to as much as we can. those who are on the receiving end of those bug fixes are pretty happy about that.

It's me, or the blur plugin it's a lot faster in RC3 than it was in RC1? I can use blur comfortably in my GeForce 6150 powered laptop now!

Edit: It's not like so. It looks like... a massive bugfixing in the "Direct Rendering" mode. With KDE SC 4.0 to 4.3, when I tried to use Direct Rendering, KWin CPU usage hovered all time around 40%. KDE 4.4 slashed some of that, and in KDE 4.5 Direct Rendering, for NVIDIA users, is FASTER, MUCH FASTER, than Indirect Rendering (60% X CPU usage watching Flash video on Indirect Rendering versus 7% + 18% [KWin] on Direct Rendering).

So, if you have been experiencing slowdowns with NVIDIA or simply want a faster blur, this is the one.

the kwin devs have been doing fantastic things, and they aren't standing still. already they are working on improvements for the January 2011 release. i'm really, really impressed with the work they are doing, even with relatively few hands. so yeah, kudos to the kwinners!

KDE releases sourcecode, not a whole distribution. However, yes, it would be nice if distro's would provide livecd's and let the users use them to test. I might be able to make that happen in the future ;-)

As flash is more or less broken in konqueror with both engine kparts (rekonq too). I understood that khtml should support something, but wikimedia, youtube and vimeo all are broken with all the possible phonon configurations.

4.4 was supposed to have something good so is 4.5 finally gonna have something that works? At least at the moment nothing seems to work even with the latest phonon-vlc shizzle :'(

Other that that 4.5 looks awesome :) even though the activity and virtual desktop stuff is a bit confusing especially when kwin only seems to care virtual desktops with it's effects.

Well HTML5 is also implemented in KHTML, though scripting of media-objects is still uncommitted. HTML5 in webkitpart doesn't work either though, because QtWebKit depends on Qt's Phonon, and refuses to acknowledge the independent Phonon typically shipped with KDE. Since the KDE Phonon works better with Linux, it is usually shipped by all distros, and thus HTML5 doesn't work in webkitpart. *sigh*

It's very sad, KDE 4.5 looks really great, but the Dolphin crashes are a showstopper for me. It crashes every few minutes and right now I have counted 25 bug reports for RC2 and RC3 when searching for "dolphin crash". Don't know how many there are for RC1 and earlier.

A working filemanager is one of the most important applications and Dolphin has been best in class so far. Please, please fix it.

You should ignore the bug status. Bugs in the KDE bug tracker can start either as NEW or as UNCONFIRMED, depending on who reported it.

Usually, when a KDE developer itself reports a bug, it automatically gets the NEW status. But this does not mean the bug is confirmed.

A bug which cannot be confirmed to be a valid bug will usually be resolved as WORKSFORME, INVALID, UPSTREAM, or DOWNSTREAM quickly, so you can take it as a confirmation when bug stays open for a longer time.

Please don't assume that developers ignore bug reports just because they are still marked as UNCONFIRMED. If they had more time they would rather spent it in solving the bug then just pleasing you by changing the status to NEW. Sorry if this sounds harsh.

I think this is a perception problem. I totally get why the bugs remain UNCONFIRMED but to me that's like a sign constantly saying "we don't care". No matter how hard we convince users we do, the sign is still there.

When a bug is identified, putting it at CONFIRMED at least acknowledges the problem for the user - letting them know a dev understands their problem. :)

I said that KDE 4.5 deserved a delay, and today, it got it. While we are in the delay, I'll ask some questions.

1. Is the beta 2 of KDE PIM delayed also? I'm anxiously waiting for it because it contains the fix for a bug that actually bans me from properly testing (Akonadi mail engine doesn't work if you have huge attachments in your inbox, so, I can't download all of my mail, that's on beta 1). That bug was reported by me, of course ;).

2. Can you release right now a "RC4" of KDE SC? It would help to test all of the last minute changes and have a solid 4.5 release.

I got some preliminary builds through KDE Unstable Red-Hat repository, and there are some interesting remarks.

1. What have you done to the framerate for screen animations, direct-rendering mode? Whatever you've done, it's awesome. There're more frames running, animations get almost as smooth as with indirect rendering, and videos run better than they did... on RC3! Yes, there are PERFORMANCE INCREASES between RC3 and final. This is more than what I've expected.

2. This spells the end for most Dolphin crashes, but not for all of them. Some are caused by the infamous DBus race condition, and that will have to wait until DBus 1.4.0. That's TOO long...

Yeah, but we are in the age of build servers, how do you know that your source builds? I expect KDE distributors to do Tinderbox-ing. For a Live-CD you use automated scripts and make a daily build. With the daily build you can run automated gui tests.